Marvelous Architectures

Gal Nauer Architects To Design Historic Renovation of Post PalaisHotel in Berlin

2011-05-25T14:50:00.000+02:00

Gal Nauer Architects (http://www.gnarchitect.com/), an international architecture firm led by world-renowned architect Gal Nauer with studios in New York and Tel Aviv, announced today that it has been commissioned to design the historic renovation and conversion of the Post Palais Hotel in Berlin. A project spanning over two centuries, the Post Palais Hotel originally served as a post office and will now be adaptively re-used as a modern luxury hotel incorporating a historic façade.

GAL NAUER ARCHITECTS TO DESIGN HISTORIC RENOVATION AND CONVERSION OF THE POST PALAIS HOTEL IN BERLIN, A PROJECT SPANNING TWO CENTURIES
NEW YORK – May 19, 2011 – Gal Nauer Architects (GNA), an international architecture firm with studios in New York and Tel Aviv, today announced that it has been commissioned to design the historic renovation and conversion of the Post Palais Hotel in Berlin. A project spanning over two centuries, the Post Palais Hotel originally served as a post office and will now be adaptively re-used as a modern luxury hotel incorporating a historic façade. The building is comprised of approximately 120,000 square feet.

As part of its inclusive design concept for the six-story, early 20th Century building, GNA will create a comprehensive interior design plan for the new hotel, including the guest rooms and all public spaces such as the lobby, restaurant, cigar bar, night club, ballroom facilities, wellness center, spa and executive meeting facilities.

“We are excited to be a part of this significant project and introduce a new standard of contemporary design, along with a universe of hospitality amenities, which will complement Berlin’s already thriving cultural and tourist communities,” said Gal Nauer, chief designer and president of Gal Nauer Architects. “The open, inviting spaces and unique design elements that we have incorporated into this project will transform the Post Palais Hotel into a magnificent new city destination reflecting the cosmopolitan, vibrant culture of Berlin.”

GNA’s interior design for the hotel goes well beyond conventional hotel room design, which often resembles a box-shaped envelope. Each space will be inviting to guests and enhanced by high ceilings and large windows, with the goal to create an “open space feel” combined with interiors that feature natural design elements and a reference to the Orient.

“The overall hotel design incorporates destination points for visitors and guests that reflect a world of experiences from health and fitness to entertainment and business activities,” added Ms. Nauer.

The project is expected to be completed by year-end 2012.

GNA Architects
International architectural and interior design firm, Gal Nauer Architects, has two locations to serve its distinguished clientele – GNA Studio in New York and GNA Studio in Tel Aviv. The firm was founded by architect and designer Gal Nauer in 2000. The GNA team provides innovative solutions for high-end projects, from luxury homes to large-scale, mixed-use developments. GNA brings its expertise to bear on master planning, architecture, interior design and product design. To learn more about GNA, please visit the firm’s website at www.gnarchitect.com.

“Museo Soumaya” a new amazing Museum in Mexico City

2011-02-28T09:03:00.005+01:00

“Museo Soumaya” schedules opening March 2011
A new art container has raised at the west part of the city, new “Museo Soumaya” will be open to the public next month. Designed by FREE Fernando Romero, this new venue will exhibit more than 6,200 art pieces over 60,000 square feet.
After four years of development, on March 2011 “Museo Soumaya” host of one of the most important art collections in Latin America will be open to the public. Its heterogeneous collection is housed in a continuous exhibition space spread over six levels. Its structure is constructed with 28 steel curved columns each with its own geometry and shape, connected by rings and diagonal series that form an isometric figure. The diversity of its collection is reflected on the diversity of the plans; each level has its own dimension. The façade is made of hexagonal aluminum modules that optimize the preservation and durability of the entire building.

Green Point Stadium - Cape Town

2010-06-14T15:05:00.001+02:00

Green Point Stadium - Cape Town (South Aftica)

(for more pcture click here)

+ by Art4you.it

MACRO of Rome designed by Odile Decq

2010-05-27T15:34:00.000+02:00

After the Maxxi designed by Zaha Hadid a new great museum in Rome; the MACRO designed by Odile Decq.
(http://www.art4you.it)

Design Museum Holon

2010-05-26T21:00:00.000+02:00

Design Museum Holon in Israel, designed by Ron Arad.
(http://www.art4you.it)

Design Museum Holon in Israel, designed by Ron Arad.
(http://www.art4you.it)

French pavilion in Shanghai

2010-04-12T14:24:00.003+02:00

French pavilion in Shanghai Expo2010

Luxembourg pavilion in Shanghai

2010-04-11T15:20:00.000+02:00

Luxembourg pavilion in Shanghai (China) for Expo2010.

Italian pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai

2010-04-10T16:18:00.000+02:00

Italian pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai

Ara Pacis

2010-04-09T17:15:00.000+02:00

In the Center of Rome the Ara Pacis, designed by Richard Meier

American Embassy in UK

2010-02-25T09:40:00.000+01:00

The New American Embassy in London

Kraanspoor, Amsterdam

2010-02-07T16:04:00.000+01:00

Kraanspoor, Amsterdam. Architetto: Oth Author: Photo by Christiaan De Bruijne

Tetto Expodach 2000, Hannover

2010-02-06T15:02:00.000+01:00

Tetto Expodach 2000, Hannover. Progetto di Thomas Herzog Author: Photo by Verena Herzog-Loibl

Genzyme Corporation Headquarter

2010-02-05T14:30:00.000+01:00

Genzyme Corporation Headquarter, Cambridge, MA. Architetto: Behnisch, Behnisch Author: Photo by Anton Grassl

Linked Hybrid Beijing

2010-02-04T14:30:00.000+01:00

Linked Hybrid Beijing, Cina. Architect: Steven Holl Architects Photo by Iwan Baan

Cape Town Stadium

2010-01-15T14:40:00.000+01:00

Cape Town stadium (South Africa).

Casa Sociale

2010-01-14T14:35:00.000+01:00

Casa Sociale (Social House) in Milan, designed by Massimo Basile & Floriana Marotta (Mab arquitectura)

Ex Arsenale della Maddalena

2010-01-13T14:35:00.001+01:00

HEADQUARTER COMMERCIAL BANK OF ETHIOPIA

2010-01-08T15:00:00.000+01:00

COMPETITION 2009, 1st PRIZE, HEADQUARTER COMMERCIAL BANK OF ETHIOPIA, ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA designed by Henn Architekten

Solidity meets proximity: The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) is to construct a 42-storey building for its headquarters in Addis Ababa. The building will be the tallest building ever in Ethiopia. One of the fundamental values in banking is trust. Solidity and integrity are as much a part of trust as transparency and proximity to the customer. This duality finds expression in the mixture of open and more reserved elements of the design. On the longer sides of the slender office tower, a gap opens in the curtain facade to reveal the city from a new perspective. The reduced reflection of the glass skin here permits a contrasting glimpse inside the building. This openness continues to base level, where it reveals the entrance area. The tower is accompanied by a conference centre and a shopping mall. The buildings cluster around a sunken landscaped plaza.

I-SUITE HOTEL

2010-01-07T15:30:00.000+01:00

I-SUITE Hotel in Rimini (Italy)

GROUNDBREAKING, RESEARCH CENTRE FOR MOLECULAR VETERINARY MEDICINE IN BERLIN

2009-12-10T10:25:00.001+01:00

GROUNDBREAKING, RESEARCH CENTRE FOR MOLECULAR VETERINARY MEDICINE IN BERLIN designed by HENNARCHITEKTEN

Five Institutes of the department of veterinary medicine at the Freie Universität Berlin will be moving into one combined Research Centre on the campus Düppel in Berlin-Zehlendorf. The institutions are working in the fields of virology, parasitology, tropical veterinary medicine, microbiology and animal epidemics, immunology and molecular biology as well as animal- and environmental hygiene. The centralization of the infectiology institutes into one building enables new synergetic effects at the combined use of the state-of-the-art laboratory facilities. The cooperation of research and teaching through spatial adjacencies of institutions develops joint areas of communication at the same time. Vertical timber fins create a rythm in the band of windows and the basement of the clearly structured brick facade. The building inserts itself harmonically into the suburban surrounding by conscious use of materials and its modest and compact cubage.

Lofts @ Cherokee Studios by Pugh + Scarpa

2009-11-26T16:10:00.000+01:00

The Lofts @ Cherokee Studios are completed. Expected to achieve LEED Platinum certification from the USGBC, the new 12-unit live/work building is the first of its kind on the West Coast. To view photos, please click through this gallery. http://tarawujcik.com/Lofts/

Cowboys Stadium

2009-11-26T15:50:00.000+01:00

Dallas Cowboys new amazing stadium, designed by HKS Inc.

Lonate Ceppino Library

2009-11-23T14:57:00.000+01:00

Lonate Ceppino Library designed by DAP studio architetto

Memory and Light

2009-11-22T15:34:00.000+01:00

Memoria e Luce (Memory and Light) in Padova (Italy) designed by Daniel Libeskind

Royal Ontario museum

2009-11-21T15:32:00.000+01:00

Royal Ontario museum designed by Daniel Libeskind

Jewish Museum in Berlin

2009-11-20T18:30:00.000+01:00

Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind

Cube House

2009-11-20T09:25:00.000+01:00

( From Progetto Nuova Energia )
Cube House - The eco-house winner of 'Solar decathlon 2009', designed by Technische Universität Darmstadt
Technische Universität Darmstadt
Department of Architecture
Energy Efficient Building Design
Dipl.-Ing. Johanna Henrich
henrich@ee.tu-darmstadt.de
phone: +49 [0]6151 16-54 73
fax: +49 [0]6151 16-52 47
http://www.solardecathlon.tu-darmstadt.de/home/home.de.jsp

London Metropolitan University

2009-11-19T16:00:00.000+01:00

London Metropolitan University designed by Daniel Libeskind

La Gare do Oriente

2009-11-19T14:56:00.000+01:00

La Gare do Oriente (in Lisbon, Portugal) designed by Santiago Calatrava.

Puente de la Mujer

2009-11-18T14:00:00.000+01:00

Puente de la Mujer in Buenos Aires, Designed by Santiago Calatrava

Norwegian White House

2009-11-17T14:50:00.001+01:00

A White House designed by JVA (Jarmund/Vigsnæs AS Arkitekter MNAL), in the Norwegian Town of Strand.

The Lights of Berlin Hauptbahnhof

2009-11-16T18:06:00.001+01:00

The lights of Berlin Central station or Berlin Hauptbahnhof

MAXXI AGAIN

2009-11-13T16:00:00.001+01:00

Others pictures of the MAXXI, the Contemporary Art Museum of Rome designed by Zaha Hadid

Zollverein School of Management and Design

2009-11-13T14:30:00.001+01:00

Zollverein School of Management and Design, Zeche Zollverein, Essen/Germany
building constructed by Sanaa (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa)
Picture by michael hoefner

MAXXI di Roma

2009-11-12T20:30:00.000+01:00

MAXXI, Contemporary art center of Rome (Italy) Designed by Zaha Hadid.

2009-11-12T17:08:00.000+01:00

Hugo Boss New Concept Store - USA - NY, Meatpacking District, (2008) designed by Matteo Thun

Tortona 37

2009-11-11T14:40:00.000+01:00

Tortona 37 - Milano (2009)designed by Matteo Thun

Vigilius Mountain Resort

2009-11-11T14:35:00.002+01:00

Vigilius Mountain Resort - Lana, Merano (2003)

Centre for Sustainable Energy Technologies(CSET)

2009-10-14T10:10:00.000+02:00

Centre for Sustainable Energy Technologies(CSET) of the University of Nottingham in Ningbo (China) designed by Mario Cucinella.

Ground-breaking Ceremony AEROspace Centre III, Wildau

2009-10-10T15:10:00.000+02:00

Ground-breaking ceremony Aerospace Centre III (ZLR III), Wildau
Competition May 2009, 1st Prize
The Aerospace Centre III (ZLR III) in Wildau provides additional space for the numerous growing companies seeking premises in the
area around the new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport and Wildau University of Applied Sciences. The Dahme-Spreewald Economic
Development Agency is using its experience in this field with the aim of exploiting the dynamic of the region in good time for the
opening of the airport. A large two-storey hall, with its ground floor divided into smaller units, occupies a total of 4.100 sqm, and
is where engine components, among other items, are manufactured. A spacious foyer on the side facing the road can be used as
exhibition space or a lecture theatre. Roof terraces and a courtyard are created between the two office floors above. The building
offers 5.000 sqm of flexible office space for hall users and other innovative companies. The green roof sections of the hall roof
are accessible from the offices. The building forms a counterbalance to the existing Aerospace Centre at the top of the old heavy
machinery park and represents a visible sign of the change in local industry. The volume divides into fingers at the back, where
the building has a more fragmented appearance, between which are the areas of green roof. The largest users are already involved
in the planning and design process and will receive a building that is tailor-made for their precise needs. A flexible, high-quality
fitting-out scheme makes it easy for further cutting-edge users to customise their areas to suit their needs, even during the
construction period.

Kontakt // Contact

Henn Architekten
Rainer Sladek

Augustenstrasse 54
80333 München

Phone +49 89 52357-832
Rainer.Sladek@henn.com
http://www.henn.com/#de/aktuell

Kontakt // Contact

Regionale Wirtschaftsförderungsgesellschaft Dahme-Spreewald mbH
Marion Fender

Freiheitstraße 120/Aufgang A
15745 Wildau

Phone +49 3375 5238-30
fender@wfg-lds.de
www.wfg-lds.de

The New Acropolis Museum

2009-06-23T14:55:00.000+02:00

The New Acropolis Museum, which cost $200 million and sits near the base of the Acropolis with a direct view of the Parthenon, is one of the highest-profile cultural projects undertaken in Europe in this decade. It is scheduled to open on Saturday.
The new facility, 226,000 square feet of glass and concrete designed by the New York-based architect Bernard Tschumi, replaces the old Acropolis Museum, a small 1874 building tucked into the rock of the Acropolis next to the Parthenon.

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

2009-06-22T14:50:00.000+02:00

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art: The college’s new academic building, a contemporary work designed between Sixth and Seventh Streets in the East Village.

CSET, Centre for Sustainable Energy Technologies

2009-04-29T16:58:00.000+02:00

CSET, Centre for Sustainable Energy Technologies, Ningbo, China.
Designed by Mario Cucinella on Nottingham University's campus in Ningbo, China.

Bocconi University

2009-03-27T17:26:00.000+01:00

Bocconi University in Milan

Herzog & de Meuron’s 40 Bond Street

2008-12-27T18:58:00.000+01:00

Herzog & de Meuron’s 40 Bond Street, an exclusive residential building — one of many such projects new to Manhattan.

The Museum of Islamic Art

2008-12-17T17:33:00.000+01:00

The Museum of Islamic Art at Doha, Qatar, was designed by I. M. Pei.

Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre in Dundee

2008-12-07T10:26:00.002+01:00

One of Gehry's most low-key creations, Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre in Dundee, was opened in 2003

Ray and Maria Stata Centre

2008-12-05T10:24:00.000+01:00

The Ray and Maria Stata Centre, opened in 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is an academic institute where the likes of Noam Chomsky study. Internet genius Tim Berners-Lee also has an office there

Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

2008-12-04T15:20:00.000+01:00

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in New York's Hudson Valley, a $62 million creation completed in 2003, houses two theatres and four dance and music studios.

Ferrari restaurant

2008-11-28T15:39:00.000+01:00

A restaurant designed by Marco Visconti at the Ferrari facilities in Maranello, Italy

Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto

2008-11-17T14:44:00.000+01:00

Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto refurbished by Frank O. Ghery.

Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto refurbished by Frank O. Ghery.

Shipping and Transport College

2008-11-04T17:20:00.000+01:00

Shipping and Transport College, Rotterdam, designed by Neutelings Riedijk

Southern Cross Station

2008-11-03T16:36:00.000+01:00

Southern Cross Station (roof), Melbourne

A space-age metallic bar

2008-10-23T17:51:00.000+02:00

A space-age metallic bar designed for Home House in London by the architect Zaha Hadid (Zaha Haid Architects)

Milan New Fair Towers

2008-10-03T17:15:00.000+02:00

Milan new Fair Towers designed byDominique Perrault

California Academy of Sciences

2008-09-29T15:56:00.000+02:00

The greenest building of thye world, California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, designed by Renzo Piano

NY Museum of Arts and Design

2008-09-26T17:36:00.000+02:00

Kit home by Rocio Romero

2008-09-16T21:15:00.000+02:00

skyscrapers in Tribeca (NY)

2008-09-15T17:35:00.000+02:00

A new Bridge in Venice

2008-08-27T14:48:00.000+02:00

A New Bridge in Venice, designed by Santiago Calatrava

Bruder Klaus Chapel

2008-08-22T12:03:00.002+02:00

Peter Zumthor, Bruder Klaus Chapel, Germany

Spain Library, Medellín, Colombia

2008-08-16T10:52:00.000+02:00

Giancarlo Mazzanti Arquitectos, Spain Library, Medellín, Colombia

Olympic Beijing from the sky

2008-07-30T18:44:00.000+02:00

San Francisco’s new Contemporary Jewish Museum

2008-06-09T15:37:00.000+02:00

San Francisco’s new Contemporary Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind

The Museion in Bolzano

2008-05-26T17:40:00.000+02:00

The Museion; The contemporary Art museum of Bolzano (Italy), designed by KSW

the 400 Fifth Avenue

2008-05-14T14:54:00.000+02:00

New Apple retail store in NY

2008-05-12T16:52:00.000+02:00

New Apple retail store in NY designed by Bohlin, Cywinski, Jackson

Dass Museum

2008-05-10T23:08:00.000+02:00

Dass Museum by Snøhetta (Norway)

The Riverhouse

2008-05-05T15:14:00.000+02:00

A Green Building in in New York City, the Riverhouse

(From Progetto Nuova Energia)

FLARE - kinetic ambient reflection membrane

2008-04-28T12:19:00.000+02:00

Tratto da Technology Revelation

FLARE is a pneumatic building facade system. The FLARE system consists of a number of tiltable metal flake bodies. An infinite array of flakes can be mounted on any building or wall surface in a modular system of multiplied 4x4 FLARE units. Each stainless steel flake reflects the bright sky or sunlight when in vertical standby position. When the flake is tilted downwards by a computer controlled pneumatic piston, its face is shaded from the sky light and this way appears as a dark pixel. By reflecting ambient or direct sunlight the individual flakes of the FLARE system act like pixels formed by natural light. The system is controlled by a computer to form any kind of surface animation. Sensor systems inside and outside the building communicate the buildings activity directly to the FLARE system which acts as the buildings lateral line. FLARE turns the building facade into a penetrable membrane, breaking with all conventions of the building surface as a static skin. http://www.flare-facade.com / http://www.whitevoid.com

National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing)

2008-04-27T17:28:00.000+02:00

Beijing: Pool and Stadium

2008-04-22T09:31:00.000+02:00

Olympics Pool ans Stadium

Richard Rogers' greatest buildings

2008-04-20T09:26:00.000+02:00

'I compare buildings to children. You can't have a favourite child,' says Britain's best-known architect, and the subject of a major exhibition. None the less, we asked him to play favourites with his brood - Terminal 5 included. By Dominic Bradbury
1 WIMBLEDON HOUSE, LONDON, 1969
One of Rogers's first solo projects after the dissolution of his early partnership with Su Rogers and Norman and Wendy Foster, the Wimbledon House was a commission for his parents which contained many key ideas that were to develop and evolve in later years. Now home to Rogers's son, Ab, and his family.
'I was very close to my parents. They wanted a house that had two bedrooms, and my father was a doctor, so there was a small consulting room. They wanted a certain amount of fluidity, somewhere to put the cars, and my mother was a potter, so she wanted a studio.
'It's an open-ended frame made up of elements that could be bought over the counter - standard steel joints and prefabricated panels made for the installation industry.
'It was very much a prototype. You can make a direct link from the Wimbledon House to the Pompidou Centre - it's all there, the exposed steel frame, the bright colours: it's about flexibility, adaptability. The idea was that the house could march down the garden and could easily grow as well as change.'

2 POMPIDOU CENTRE, PARIS, 1977
Winning the international competition to design the Pompidou Centre - with Renzo Piano - in 1970 was a life-changing moment for the architects, who at the time were virtually unknown. The resulting building is not only iconic, but still has the power to surprise us with its originality, modernity and scale.
'Looking back, I realise how amazingly brave it was of the government of this historic city to allow two very young architects, who had built practically nothing more than a single storey, not only to build this building but also to change a neighbourhood.
'There was a very clear functional framework and tremendous flexibility. Each floor had virtually no interruptions and was the size of two football pitches. Every juror and curator saw their museum, their library, their design, in any way they wanted, because they were being given an almost blank piece of paper with all the services running up the outside.
'We started by saying this was a place for all people, all ages, all creeds, the old and the young, a cross between the British Museum and New York's Times Square, a culture and fun palace.'
3 LLOYD'S BUILDING, LONDON, 1986
Lloyd's headquarters presented a new face of the City. It divided opinion, with criticism of its innovative design, including a vast central atrium and the services - as with Pompidou - fixed to the outside of the building. It's now widely regarded as a masterpiece.
'I don't think we ever set out to make radical buildings - that would be presumptuous and I wouldn't know how to start. All ideas start from other ideas or other images. One builds on images from the past, although one works in the present and tries to imagine the future. The one thing you don't try to do is shock people. When people hated Lloyd's we felt affronted - the shock of the new does have that effect sometimes.'

4 NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FOR WALES, CARDIFF, 2005
A key step in the march to regional devolution, this building had to exemplify the ambitions of a new Wales, while balancing the need for security on the one hand and public accessibility on the other.
'We used Welsh materials, yet more importantly it has a strong context around it, not least with Cardiff Bay and the Victorian buildings next door, so we took cues from all of those. But it is also a parliament, and we took the view that it had to be transparent, that people in general had to have access, and so the public domain was critical. This starts with Cardiff Bay, goes up the steps and all the way inside. The whole main floor is public, and only below that does it become private, where the Assembly is positioned. So it's transparent, both in terms of being democratic - with a "democratic" roof, in the sense that it's all-including - and also physically transparent, because the walls are in glass and you can look out at this amazing bay.'
5 BARAJAS AIRPORT, MADRID, SPAIN, 2005
This vast dramatic building carried off the Stirling Prize in 2006. The terminal is an extraordinary feat of engineering and design. Pleasure was key, as in so many Rogers buildings, with a bold use of colour-coded sections helping to soften the building.
'It harks back to the excitement of the great Victorian railway stations, which our work does generally, by the way. With that came the concept of an amazing floating roof and also the concept of colour. Because the building is 0.75 miles long, instead of having a few colours, we said let's use the colours of the rainbow, so not only would it help break down the massive scale of the building, but you could also say, "I'll meet you under the pink column." There's a certain romance and poetry within that - one is always looking for a rhythm of poetry and language.'
6 TERMINAL 5, HEATHROW, LONDON, 2008
Long in the making, T5 has been marred by a stream of negative headlines focusing on operational problems beyond the architect's control.
'We were pleased with the shell and core - it's an amazing span. When you come in through the bridges and see down into six floors of canyon with a glass façade, you really feel yourself entering the airport, and you can also see through it to the aeroplanes and the roof flowing over it. The negative side for us has been that the project has been going on for 19 years, and keeping a team's spirits up and a clear vision over that time is nearly impossible. That is completely crazy.
'We left three years ago, then the commercial people did their bit and the technology was put in. They tested so many things in those last months before opening, with thousands of actors and bags going through. What happened on the opening day I have no more idea than anybody else. It must be disappointing, but as far as the construction was concerned it was on time and on cost.'

7 MAGGIE'S CENTRE, CHARING CROSS HOSPITAL, HAMMERSMITH, LONDON, 2008
The first Maggie's Centre for cancer care in England opens this month, after the success of five centres in Scotland. Founded by the late Maggie Keswick Jencks and her husband, Charles, the centres use world-class architects to create welcoming spaces for retreat and understanding.
'Maggie died of cancer. She was a wonderful woman, a powerful intellect and an expert on gardens. It's not a place to go to be cured, in terms of taking medicines or having surgery, but somewhere you can meet others and talk about the future. It's a home, really, an extension of a house, but manned by experts, nurses and friends. There's a canteen, a hearth, places where you can go to cry or laugh. It's more like the scale of a house outside a large hospital that is rather soulless.'

Stazione Centrale di Milano

2008-04-19T12:58:00.006+02:00

Milan Central Station (Stazione Centrale di Milano)

Jean Nouvel win the Pritzker 2008

2008-03-31T15:16:00.002+02:00

Jean Nouvel win the Pritzker 2008

Heathrow Terminal 5

2008-03-26T18:33:00.000+01:00

Museum of Contemporary Art of Milan

2008-03-19T00:11:00.000+01:00

Inside Heathrow Terminal 5

2008-03-05T02:08:00.000+01:00

BEIJING'S AQUATIC CENTRE

2008-01-30T01:44:00.000+01:00

Beijing's National Aquatic Centre has opened after four years in construction.With a seating capacity of 17,000, the Centre, known as the "Watercube", will host swimming, diving, and synchronised swimming competitions during this summer's Olympic Games

Beijing Olympic Pool

2008-01-28T18:28:00.001+01:00

World's greenest office block set for Paris

2008-01-06T02:19:00.000+01:00

The architect behind New York's Freedom Tower - built on the former site of the World Trade Centre - has announced that it is to construct what promises to be the world's greenest office building.
The office block, which will be branded Energy Plus, is to be built in the run-down area of Gennevilliers in the outskirts of Paris.

The project's creator, architect Skidmore Owings & Merrill, says it is also in talks to construct similar buildings in the US, Europe and the Middle East.
America's Rocky Mountain Institute, the prestigious environmental think-tank, is advising on Energy Plus, and the project was endorsed by former US president Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting last year.
Patrick Getreide, who is leading the Energy Plus project with partner Marc Eisenberg, said: "It will be the first building in the world to be 'energy plus' and carbon zero."
The proposed building, which will be more than 70,000 sq m and house up to 5,000 people, will produce enough of its own electricity to power all the heating, lighting, and air conditioning required by tenants. It will also generate carbon credits which it hopes to trade for money in the future.

Commercial property is urgently in need of greener standards, Mr Getreide said. "Many people think cars are the big polluters but it is not true.
In France 47pc of pollution comes from real estate, 33pc is from industry and 23pc comes from cars."
Mr Getreide admitted the building will be more expensive to construct than conventional office blocks, a cost that will have to be passed on to tenants.
But the builders hope to price their Energy Plus buildings on a par with the costlier end of the conventional commercial property rental market in any given area.
Mr Getreide said: "It will be 25pc to 30pc more expensive than a normal building to construct. But there will be big savings - tenants will not have to pay for any electricity, and maintenance costs will also be lower."
He added that there is an extra value to renting space in the building: "You have to calculate the value of this over 25 years - we all have to pay the price for living in a better world where there is less pollution."
The Energy Plus building will generate its own electricity by having more solar panels on it than any other building in existence, while its cooling system will take water from the nearby river Seine and pump it around the offices.
And by using a cutting-edge form of insulation, Mr Getreide said, his team would be able to get the amount of electricity consumption per square metre of office space per year down to 16 kilowatts, the lowest in the world for a building of its size.
Most modern buildings use between 80 and 250 kilowatts per square metre, while older ones often use up to 300 kilowatts.
Such projects as the Energy Plus building, which will take more than a year to construct, would struggle to get off the ground without the support of high-profile backers such as Mr Clinton and financial incentives from governments, Mr Getreide said.
Skidmore Owings & Merrill is also behind the skyscraper Burj Dubai, which, when it is completed, will be the world's tallest man-made structure.

Even if his own work isn't broken, a Brazilian architect fixes it

2008-01-05T03:31:00.000+01:00

What to do with our aging architectural heroes? What if their genius deteriorates and they begin tinkering with their own masterpieces?
A powerful case in point is the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who celebrated his 100th birthday this month. In the 1940s, '50s and '60s he established himself as one of Modernism's greatest luminaries, infusing stark abstract forms with a beguiling tropical hedonism that reshaped Brazil's identity in the popular imagination and mesmerized architects around the globe.
In Brasília, a city that rose out of a savanna in the span of four years, he created at least a half dozen architectural masterpieces — a mind-boggling accomplishment by today's standards. Today Niemeyer is held up as one of Brazil's greatest national treasures, and he seems as spry as ever. He is at work on a cultural center in Aviles, Spain, and another in Niteroi, just south of Rio de Janeiro. He recently unveiled a new line of furniture at the Art Basel Miami fair. And last year he married his longtime secretary, Vera Lúcia Cabreira.
In recognition of the heroic scale of his accomplishments, Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, recently proposed legislation that would confer special landmark status on all of his buildings.
But the greatest threat to Niemeyer's remarkable legacy may not be the developer's bulldozer or insensitive city planners, but Niemeyer himself.
It is not simply that his latest buildings have a careless, tossed-off quality. It's that some of his most revered buildings — from the Brasília Cathedral to the grand Monumental Axis of the city itself — have been marred by the architect's own hand. And this poses an uncomfortable dilemma: At what point do we — that is, the public that idolizes him, his government and private clients — have an obligation to intervene? Or is posing the question an act of spectacularly bad taste?
To those who pay close attention, the decline in the quality of Niemeyer's work — whether resulting from a creative lull or complacency brought on by fame or old age — has been evident since he completed his Museum of Contemporary Art in Niteroi in 1996. Resting lightly on a single column at the edge of a cliff, its white saucer-shaped form looks best against the glamorous backdrop of Guanabara Bay.
What's missing, however, is the lightness of touch that could draw you deeper into the work. The concrete surfaces are crude and unfinished; the structure lacks the careful refinement that gave his early buildings a textured significance and signaled that the architect cared deeply about the people who would inhabit them.
It's as if the museum were designed by a lesser talent who could mimic the graceful lines in Niemeyer's sketches but lacked the skill and patience to see the design through.
But if the art museum is an inferior work that mostly suffers in comparison with his early masterpieces, his midcentury projects in central Brasília are another matter: a trove of Modernist landmarks conceived on the grandest scale.
No photograph can prepare a visitor to the 1958 National Congress building for the delicacy with which it is set into the landscape. Surrounded by immaculate lawns, its form sunken slightly into the ground, it exerts a gravitational pull as you approach. A long, narrow ramp leads to a roof, where the public can stroll around the base of the bowl-like form of the chamber of deputies. That expression of the bond between a government and the people is as moving today as it was when the building was inaugurated half a century ago.
Even more refined is the nearby Itamaraty Palace, built to house the Ministry of Foreign Relations. Its soaring slender arches, rising from vast reflecting pools, are like a soothing oasis in a vast flat landscape. Inside, a circular staircase is conceived as a series of cantilevered concrete slabs. As you climb, you can practically feel gravity releasing its hold on your body, a physical sensation that reinforces the building's visual lightness.
Such structures are arranged along the plazas with the precision of pieces on a chessboard. The spaces among them convey both an airiness and a subtle tension among their varied forms, charging the whole with energy.
Completed in an era when millions of Americans were fleeing cities for the homogenous suburbs of the Eisenhower era, and Europe was still limping through its recovery from World War II, Brasília seemed to assert that erotic desire and human tenderness had a place in modern society. Better still, the stunning speed of its construction suggested that this sensual utopia was only as far away as the next cocktail.
The force of that vision reverberated across the United States and Europe. Lincoln Center in Manhattan, Empire State Plaza in Albany, the Los Angeles Music Center — all owe a debt to Niemeyer. And today a young generation versed in computer enhancement has found inspiration in his fluid concrete curves.
But if Brasília's high-flown status as a showplace of Modernist architecture is well known, Niemeyer's more recent work there has barely been discussed.
In the mid-1980s Niemeyer altered the shape of the arches that frame the main facade of his Ministry of Justice building, sacrificing the elegance of their symmetry in favor of something more whimsical. Around the same time he renovated Brasília Cathedral, considered one of his greatest works. Designed as a series of parabolic arches that splay open at the top, its form added an exuberant touch to the Monumental Axis. Niemeyer painted its exposed concrete structure white, and he replaced its towering windows with stained-glass panels designed by Marianne Peretti: changes that detract from the raw force of the building's upward thrust.
Perhaps most damaging, however, was the completion last year of Niemeyer's National Museum and National Library along the Monumental Axis. The museum's white dome, pierced at one end by a long ramp, rests on its concrete plaza with the grace of an army bunker. The interior's curved walls and lack of natural light — a shame in a climate like Brazil's — make it an uncomfortable place to view art.
The National Library, just next door, is a somber rectangular box clad in perforated screens, redolent of standard Modernist formulas. Its vaulted base, propped up on thin columns, evokes a generic government building from the 1960s.
But what's worst about these two buildings is their placement. Until a few years ago visitors could drive up a gently sloping hill before arriving at the crest, where the entire Monumental Axis unfolded in front of them. The symmetrical rows of government buildings were broken only by the exuberant form of the cathedral and the congress hall complex, its towers set slightly off center, in the far distance.
Now that view is blocked by the monotonous forms of the museum and library, and the sense of surprise is lost.
Nobody can fault Niemeyer for his desire to keep working; that his enthusiasm is undimmed at the age of 100 is cause for awe. And it's laudable that he approaches his past work without an exaggerated self-importance. Cities are not museum pieces; without constant change, they lose their cultural vitality.
Yet the value of these Modernist buildings as part of our shared cultural memory — the foundation of our identity — cannot be underestimated.
Brasília's Monumental Axis is not simply a relic from a discounted age or an emblem of a failed utopia. It is as crucial to the values of its time as the pyramids were to theirs. To mar that vision is a cultural tragedy, even if the creator's hand is responsible.

The New Museum of Contemporary Art of New York

2008-01-04T04:31:00.000+01:00

The New Museum of Contemporary Art was designed by the Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.

From the New York Times

Contemporary art museum injects energy in New York

NEW YORK: New York is in the cultural doldrums. The city is bursting with gorgeous art exhibitions, but where is the raw energy? Where is the new blood, intent on upending the establishment? Today, once-rebellious talents often seem to be wandering lost in the constellation of celebrity, where they soon settle into complacency.
Designed by the Japanese firm Sanaa, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, on the Bowery at Prince Street on the Lower East Side, is the kind of building that renews your faith in New York as a place where culture is lived, not just bought and sold.
The architects, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, conceived the building as a series of mismatched galleries precariously stacked one atop the other. It succeeds on a spectacular range of levels: as a hypnotic urban object, as a subtle critique of the art world and as a refreshingly unpretentious place to view art.
But what elevates the building itself to art is the way it captures an unnerving moment in the city's cultural history with near-perfect pitch. Its ethereal forms hover somewhere between the legacy of a fading bohemian downtown and the ravenous appetites of a society awash in new money. That the building is so artfully rooted in the present means that its haunting quality will probably deepen as the city ages around it.
Sejima and Nishizawa may have seemed unlikely candidates to shake up the establishment. The pair is known for work of a high level of refinement and an almost aching sensitivity to a project's social and physical context. Their most celebrated project, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, is a collection of discrete pavilions enveloped in a glistening one-story glass cylinder - a heavenly village of art whose intricate network of corridors obliterates the conventional museum narrative. Its sleek forms are pieced together with a precision and care that are closer in spirit to the layout of a computer's circuit board than to the big industrial machines fetishized by the early Modernists

But the architects decided that aiming for a similar level of refinement at the New Museum would have been unwise. For one thing, the quality of craftsmanship in New York is known to be substandard, compared with the workmanship at construction sites in, say, Japan. And the 60,000-square-foot, or 5,570-square-meter, New Museum building was built on a relatively modest budget of $50 million.
More important, the museum was intent on staying tethered to what was left of the rough-and-tumble downtown art scene. The decision to move the institution from SoHo to the Bowery was an effort to tap into its history - its uninhibited characters, seedy settings and, above all, rejection of bourgeois tastes.
The seven-story building stands amid the remnants of this forgotten landscape and a new one. Dirty brick facades flank it on two sides. SoHo's glitzy boutiques and showrooms are a few blocks to the west; the cheap, pretentious glass towers that embody the latest wave of gentrification are rising to the east and north.
The museum serves as a hinge between these two worlds. As it rises, its floors shift back and forth like a pile of boxes stacked ever so carefully. Its protective armor of aluminum mesh is a great ornamental screen. Exquisitely detailed, it is backed by a second layer of metal panels, giving the surface a subtle depth.
What results is a striking expression of the neighborhood's warring identities. When the building is approached from Prince Street, the contrast between the instability of the forms and the uniformity of the aluminum gives it a strangely enigmatic glow, evoking both a fading past and a phantom future. As you get closer, the skin becomes tougher and more industrial, echoing what's left of the neighborhood's grittier history.
The formal ambiguity is coupled with a fierce desire to bridge the divide between art and everyday life. Only a thin sheet of floor-to-ceiling glass separates the sidewalk from the museum's ground floor. Inside a lobby and loading dock are set side by side, so that pedestrians can watch the art being moved in and out of the building or gaze across to a small café and gallery at the rear of the lobby. From here, visitors can contemplate the chaos of the city in relative silence.
It's only when you ascend to the upper floors that you begin to glean the meaning of the museum's unusual form. By shifting the positions of the floors, the architects were able to create narrow skylights along the outer edges of the galleries, allowing a soft, diffuse sunlight to wash down their white walls.

This talent for extracting meaning from simple but unexpected choices - like shifting the position of a floor or the texture of a material - is what imbues Sanaa's architecture with a hint of mystery. Here, that effect surfaces in myriad ways. Because the position of the skylights varies from floor to floor, the quality of the light is never exactly the same. Some gallery floors are compact, some tall, and others far bigger but with lower ceilings. They have an intuitive relationship to one another without becoming repetitive.
Most significantly, the design brings the art to life. To focus attention on its new building, the museum chose to open with a show of contemporary sculpture; the walls are left entirely bare. Even so, you can feel the architects' empathy for the artist's hand. The gentle shifts in scale, proportion and light heighten your awareness of the surroundings, which, in turn, draws you closer to the artworks. The shifting mood of the rooms constantly encourages you to observe the sculptures from different, unexpected perspectives.
That effect is reinforced by the rawness of the spaces - exposed beams, painted white walls, cracked concrete floors. The informal quality makes the art feel wonderfully accessible. There is nothing ostentatious here, none of the fussy detailing or fancy materials that create an invisible barrier between viewer and art in so many contemporary museums and galleries.
There are other surprises. A narrow staircase, 50 feet, or 15 meters, long and 4 feet wide, connects the third and fourth floors, exaggerating the distance between the two and heightening your anticipation. At the top, a narrow wedge of space connects the staircase to the gallery, inducing a sudden sense of compression before you experience the release of stepping into the exhibition.
It will take some time, of course, to understand what impact the new building, and the art institution it houses, will have on the cultural life of New York. But not since the Museum of Modern Art rattled the foundations of the city's art establishment in the 1930s has a museum seemed so in touch with the present.
Poised at one edge of a city struggling to regain its creative momentum, the New Museum building embodies a leap of faith. It suggests a breathing space somewhere between the innocence of New York's artistic past and an encroaching money-driven cynicism. It's hard to think of another architect who's been able to capture that uneasy optimism with such grace.

Thye New York Times Tower (designed by Renzo Piano)

2007-11-17T03:30:00.000+01:00

Welt - Bmw Palace in Munchen

2007-11-10T03:17:00.000+01:00

Welt, the BMW Palace in Munchen, designed by Wolf Prix

Armani Tower in Tokio (designed by Fuksas)

2007-11-08T05:56:00.000+01:00

Armani Tower in Ginza - Tokio (designed by Fuksas)

The New Acropolis Museum

2007-11-02T00:08:00.000+01:00

The New Acropolis Museum: A dialogue with antiquity
ATHENS: No sane architect, one can assume, would want to invite comparisons between his building and the Parthenon. So it comes as little surprise that the New Acropolis Museum, which stands at the foot of one of the great achievements of human history, is a quiet work, especially by the standards of its flamboyant Swiss-born architect, Bernard Tschumi.
But in mastering his ego, Tschumi pulled off an impressive accomplishment: a building that is both an enlightening meditation on the Parthenon and a mesmerizing work in its own right. I can't remember seeing a design that is so eloquent about another work of architecture.
When this museum in Athens opens next year, hundreds of marble sculptures from the old Acropolis museum alongside the Parthenon will finally reside in a place that can properly care for them. Missing, however, will be more than half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures, the Elgin Marbles, so called since they were carted off to London by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century.
Britain's government maintains that they legally belong to the British Museum and insists that they will never be returned. The Greeks naturally argue that they belong in Athens.
Until now my sympathies tended to lie with the British. Most of the world's great museum collections have some kind of dubious deals in their pasts. Why bother untangling thousands of years of imperialist history? Wise men avert their eyes and move on.
But by fusing sculpture, architecture and the ancient landscape into a forceful visual narrative, the New Acropolis Museum delivers a revelation that trumps the tired arguments and incessant flag waving by both sides. It's impossible to stand in the top-floor galleries, in full view of the Parthenon's ravaged, sun-bleached frame, without craving the marbles' return.
The museum's rhetorical power may surprise people who have followed the project over the last six years. Tschumi won the competition with a design that seemed chaste and austere by comparison with the flamboyant confabulations that are now common in contemporary museum design.
The museum had to respond to more than 100 lawsuits before construction could begin, including disputes over its location and whether the sculptures could be moved without putting them at risk.
(Local preservationists are now fighting to block plans to demolish two landmark buildings - an Art Deco gem and a lesser neo-Classical structure - that block the sightlines from the museum to an ancient amphitheater at the base of the Acropolis.)
But the end result is a remarkably taut and subtle building. When I first glimpsed it on the approach from Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, a pedestrian avenue, it seemed to fade into the dense grid of the city. Its facade, heavy bands of glass atop a concrete base punctured by narrow windows, seemed calm and unobtrusive.
Yet as I drew closer, the forms grew more precarious. To preserve the ruins of an ancient village that was discovered at the site during construction, the entire building has been raised on huge columns. A wildly overscale concrete canopy juts over the main entry plaza. Just above, the museum's top floor seems to shift slightly, its corners cantilevering over the edge of the story below as if it is sliding off the top of the building.
This instability sets in motion a carefully paced narrative, guiding you through centuries of Greek history and allowing you to see the Parthenon with fresh eyes. An elliptical cutout in the plaza floor offers a view of the archaeological ruins below. From there you head into a low, dusky lobby and turn onto a vast ramp that leads to the main galleries.
Sunlight spills down through a concrete-and-glass grid several stories above; the floor of the ramp is a grid with fritted glass panels that allow additional glimpses of the subterranean ruins. As you walk upward, you pass a series of chiseled figures on gray marble pedestals before arriving at an Archaic limestone pediment at the top of the ramp. The procession echoes the climb to the Parthenon, which culminates when you pause before the stark columns of the Propylaea, or entrance.
Yet only as you turn the corner and enter the main gallery do you begin to grasp the significance of the journey. This vast space, now empty, will soon be filled with sculptures of gods and other mythological figures dating from the Mycenaean period to the early fifth century B.C. A fragment of a marble pediment that depicts Athena wrestling with giants will anchor the gallery's far end. From there you loop around to more escalators and stairs, leading to a mezzanine restaurant and a small gallery that will house a balustrade from the Temple of Athens depicting the goddess flanked by winged Nikes.

Tschumi aims to create a montage of visual experiences. The roaming viewer stands in for the camera, collecting and reassembling images along the way. Only when you reach your destination do they fuse into a coherent vision.
The sense of anticipation reaches its full pitch as you enter the museum's top-floor galleries. They echo the layout of the Parthenon itself, with a colonnade set around a sacred inner temple chamber. The temple friezes will be mounted in an unbroken sequence along a central core so that you will be able to follow the narrative without interruption. The panels lost to antiquity will be left blank; those that remain in the British Museum will be reproduced in plaster yet covered by a diaphanous veil to make clear that they're fakes. The entire floor is wrapped in glass so that you can gaze at the surrounding city.
The genius lies in how the room snaps disparate sculptural and architectural fragments into their proper context. You first enter the south side of the gallery, where the museum's friezes and metopes will be seen against the chalky backdrop of the rooftops of Athens. As you turn a corner, the Parthenon comes into full view; the ancient temple hovers through huge windows to your right. The eastern facade of the Parthenon and the sculptures that once adorned it unite in your imagination, allowing you to picture the temple as it was in Periclean Athens.
It's a magical experience. Rather than replicating or simply echoing the Classical past, Tschumi engages in a dialogue that reaches across centuries.
I carried these thoughts with me as I boarded an evening flight to London shortly after touring the museum. The next morning I walked from my hotel to the British Museum to visit the Elgin Marbles. Inside the long, narrow Duveen Gallery I felt an immediate twinge of pain.
The marbles were stunning, but they looked homesick.
To give visitors some sense of where they were in the Parthenon, the curators have hung the friezes along two facing walls, with the pediments set at each end of the gallery. Even so, you read them as individual works of art, not as part of a composition.
A panel depicting the receding tail of one horse and the advancing head of another with an expanse of blank stone in between is breathtaking. But it's hard to picture how it originally fit into the Parthenon. The lack of context is only reinforced by Lord Elgin's decision two centuries ago to cut the works out of the huge blocks of stone into which they were originally carved, a cruel act of vandalism intended to make them easier to ship.
In dismantling the ruins of one of the glories of Western civilization, Lord Elgin robbed them of their meaning. The profound connection of the marbles to the civilization that produced them is lost.
Tschumi's great accomplishment is to express this truth in architectural form. Without pomp or histrionics, his building makes the argument for the marbles' return.

The Kaufmann House

2007-10-31T14:02:00.000+01:00

Madrid, the new Wing of Prado Museum

2007-10-30T17:00:00.000+01:00

Madrid, the new Wing of Prado Museum

The extension of Madrid's great museum, which opens today, involved rebuilding a 16th-century cloister, reports Ellis Woodman
Over the past 30 years, almost every one of the world's foremost metropolitan art galleries has been extended to create extra exhibition space while providing the art-going public with all the education rooms, restaurants and retail opportunities that it increasingly expects.

One notable latecomer to this party has been the gallery that many consider to be the greatest of them all, Madrid's Prado. It has not been for want of trying.
In 1995, it staged an architectural competition to find a design for an extension. More than 700 schemes were submitted, but the jury ultimately had to concede that there simply wasn't enough land available to accommodate its brief satisfactorily. The competition was declared void and the gallery set about trying to secure more space. There weren't many possibilities.
The Prado presents a 650ft frontage to one of Madrid's most heavily trafficked avenues and is book-ended by an essential entrance courtyard at one end and by the sacrosanct Royal Botanical Gardens at the other. The only real opportunity to grow, therefore, was to the rear. The gallery owned a sliver of land between its building and the road that runs along its rear face, but it wasn't enough.
The only way to accommodate all the facilities that were required was to tunnel under the road, making a connection to a new building that would stand on the far side.

There was one obvious place where this could be done – on a plot owned by the neighbouring monastery of San Jerónimo el Real. The gallery reached an agreement that it would buy the land and rehouse the displaced monks in a new building to be constructed alongside.
There was just one problem: a large part of the site was occupied by a 16th-century cloister. It was in an extremely dilapidated state but, none the less, it was a listed monument.
The gallery held a second competition with the stipulation that the cloister would have to be incorporated within the new building. It was won by the grand old man of Spanish architecture, 70-year-old Rafael Moneo. Today, 12 years after the Prado first embarked on the project of building an extension, his scheme is to be opened by the King and Queen of Spain.
The challenge faced by Moneo was significantly compounded by the fact that the steeply sloping ground at the back of the gallery had led to the cloister being constructed on a massive platform built into the hill.
His scheme has involved the radical measure of temporarily dismantling the cloister so that the platform could be demolished and the new building constructed in its place. The cloister was then meticulously reconstructed in exactly its original location and the new building extended upwards to engulf it on two sides.
From the street, therefore, the cloister is entirely hidden from view. What we see is the new structure, built from the unusually small bricks with pencil-thin mortar joints that are so characteristic of Madrid's architecture. The building has something of the appearance of a small palazzo, boasting a windowless, almost fortified lower level and an expansive glazed loggia above.
Moneo's first proposal was for a much more abstract treatment with none of the classical overtones of the final design, but the idea of building next to the 16th-century church proved extremely contentious and the change of approach served as something of a concession to those who opposed it.
The new building houses a suite of temporary galleries beneath the cloister and ranges conservation facilities, offices and print rooms around it. By decanting these facilities from the old building it has been possible to return a significant area to its original use as exhibition space. The first exhibition to be staged in the temporary galleries is a show of the 19th-century art that has always been displayed in a separate institution, but which can now be integrated with the Prado's holdings.
Ultimately, the project might not rank among its architect's most spectacular works, but it answers an extraordinarily taxing set of requirements very persuasively and promises to have a transformative effect on the gallery. Most impressively, perhaps, there is very little about the finished building that suggests what a battle it has been to get it built.

Astrohome

2007-10-24T06:32:00.000+02:00

Few architects today have the finesse of Ben van Berkel. Working with his partner, Caroline Bos, the 50-year-old Amsterdam native has become one of a handful of designers whose approach, driven by a fascination with new computer-age technologies, has a touch of the prophetic. Of all of them, he has so far come closest to fulfilling the dream of a truly elastic world, one in which the boundaries between work and play, private and public life have all but melted away.
But in the Villa NM, the first project his Amsterdam-based firm, UNStudio, has completed in the United States, van Berkel combines this intellectual rigor with something new: a blend of play and eroticism that is a welcome relief from the puritanical tone that has infected the world of contemporary high culture.
Designed for a Russian client as a weekend house in Sullivan County, N.Y., the Villa NM conjures a tornado of images: Hudson River School paintings, garish Las Vegas casinos, ’70s kitsch and Russian fairy tales. Somehow van Berkel manages to fuse these images into a coherent architectural vision, one that allows the mind to drift through different worlds without ever becoming unhinged. The result is confirmation, if any more was needed, that van Berkel is an architect who is now hitting his full creative stride.
The client helped. A short, wiry man with penetrating eyes, Leo Tsimmer grew up in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), a grim industrial wasteland at the base of the Ural Mountains. He brings to mind the kind of maverick spirit that once defined the American West: a healthy willingness to take risks coupled with a disdain for the values of the crusty Old World establishment.
Before the fall of the Soviet Union, Tsimmer moved to Moscow, where he quickly joined a new breed of scrappy capitalists then reshaping Russia. He organized Moscow’s first rave and even opened a chain of American-style doughnut shops. Eventually, he made his way to the United States, where he expanded his business empire by exporting commodities like frozen chickens to Russia at a time when the Soviet economy was in free fall and grocery shelves in the Russian capital were often bare.
“I’m a hard-core capitalist,” Tsimmer said, standing in front of his new house in a dark flowered shirt, worn jeans and flip-flops. “But I still believe in socialism as a utopia. I just don’t know anyone who can get us there.”
Like any upwardly mobile New Yorker, Tsimmer soon began thinking about building a country house for himself; his wife, Angelika Lee; and their two kids. He found a 13-acre plot in a quiet corner of Sullivan County, a two-hour drive northwest of the city, and a few months later he spotted a model of van Berkel’s Mobius House while wandering through a show on the design of contemporary houses at the Museum of Modern Art.
“I didn’t know much about contemporary architecture then, but I loved the house,” Tsimmer said, remembering the moment. “I called the architect’s office in Amsterdam and asked for a meeting. A month later I handed him a check.”
For his part, van Berkel still seems slightly shocked describing the brusqueness of the encounter. “We met at a hotel bar, and we started to play with this idea of a Russian dacha,” he told me recently over drinks in Amsterdam. “He gave me a check on the spot. He was an unusual client. He was not afraid to experiment. Super-open-minded.”
With a little imagination, in fact, you can picture the house in the Russian countryside. To get to it, you drive past miles of rolling hills scattered with the occasional old barn and cheap one-story houses clad in vinyl siding. Eventually, you turn down a bumpy dirt road, winding up to the top of a hill surrounded by pine and birch trees with a view of undulating mountains.
The Villa NM stands atop this landscape, resting amid a dewy lawn with the coiled energy of a cobra getting ready to strike. Sealed inside a taut skin made of earth-colored spray-on concrete and mirrored glass, its rectangular form twists at midpoint, then lifts up at one end to form a canopy over a small carport.
As you circle to the back, the form twists again, this time to trace the slope of a hill. A series of decks step down to a pool, their smooth marble surfaces a sly tribute to the famous floating planes of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion.
The meaning of these contortions becomes clear only from the inside. An informal entry leads from the carport into the kitchen, whose back wall is made of polycarbonate panels embedded with softly colored L.E.D. lights. From here, the room narrows into a funnel-like passageway that twists violently to connect the two ends of the house: a floor twists around to become a wall; a wall turns into the ceiling. Broad steps cascade down through this space from the living area above.
This is the house’s connective tissue, and its elastic form conjures multiple metaphors: the muscular structure of an alien creature, a piece of toffee, a birth canal. But why mince words? It’s simply one of the most gorgeous private staircases in America. As you reach the top and enter the living room, a sweeping view of the mountains opens up through bronze tinted glass. The sequence then switches back, with a second set of stairs leading up to the bedrooms and a decadent marble-clad bathroom.
What’s most striking about the interiors, however, is their mutability. Rooms appear and then disappear from view. Spaces stretch and contract. The graceful flow of movement through the center of the house contrasts with quieter corners at either end.
To some, this may be a scary statement about our current era, where the boundaries between private and public life have less and less meaning. But it is also an attack against a central tenet of early Modernism: the association — now seemingly so naïve — of transparency and light with a healthier, morally pure society.
As van Berkel put it: “You could never hide yourself in these places — in Mies’s Farnsworth house, for example. That was a mistake of Modernism. People need places to hide from each other, too. You need everything.”
That suspicion of Modernism’s dogmatic streak is underscored by a number of playful touches. A living room fireplace, clad in brass, brings to mind a sophisticated take on the swinging ’70s; speakers are set in the pool so that you can listen to disco while frolicking underwater. (Tsimmer claims this last detail was inspired by childhood memories of watching synchronized swimmers perform on Soviet television.)
Best of all is the play of reflection and transparency in the windows, which are made of the same bronze-tinted glass used in old Las Vegas casinos. Standing in the living room on a bright afternoon, the glass gives the surrounding landscape a glorious bronze glow. But as the sun sets, the glass becomes mirrored. The landscape slowly recedes from view and you see yourself reflected in glimmering bronze. At the same time, you become suddenly aware that people can gaze in from outside, giving the house a voyeuristic frisson.
Such refinements are a testament to van Berkel’s maturity. He began his architecture career in the mid-1980s working for Zaha Hadid, who was then known for her dynamic, formal language, followed by a brief stint in the office of Santiago Calatrava, a designer known for flamboyant feats of engineering. These seemingly contradictory experiences have obviously served him well: his own architectural voice demonstrates both a willingness to explore uncharted conceptual territory and a deep understanding of how things are put together, giving his work a substance that is rare even among his most talented peers.
His first significant civic project, a bridge completed in 1996 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is reminiscent of Calatrava’s early work. The contrast between its towering wishbone-shaped pier and the lightness of the roadway creates an exquisite tension. It’s the kind of structural daring that makes Calatrava fans gush.
But while Calatrava has gone on to make increasingly flamboyant, even self-indulgent works, his protégé’s designs have become more taut and precise. In 1998, van Berkel caught the attention of many in the architecture world with the completion of the 1998 Mobius House, whose faceted concrete and glass interior was organized in a kind of elaborate figure eight. The house, which is located in Het Gooi in the Netherlands, had some of the overwrought detailing typical of a young architectural talent brimming with ideas — every handrail seems designed to make a major architectural statement. But it was also an expression of a wonderfully nuanced mind.
Taking his cue from the music of modern composers like Schoenberg and Boulez, van Berkel found that by using a limited palette of three angles — of 4, 7 and 11 degrees — he could produce a remarkably complex composition that nonetheless retained an underlying clarity. “It was a way to create a more disciplined model,” he said. “And I think it also gives the project a calmness that you might not notice at first.”
This compositional rigor was coupled with a social mission: to create a more elastic relationship between private and communal space. The owners’ respective work spaces, for example, anchor the two ends of the house, while the living area is located at the point where the various pathways through the house intersect, so that they are constantly drifting back and forth between the two.
By the time of the completion of the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, early last year, van Berkel was a more confident talent. Conceived as a finely honed machine, the museum is a bold reworking of the rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum.
Its complex, interlocking spirals — a system of ramps that lead down through galleries stocked with sleek cars — revealed the same preoccupation with complex geometries as his earlier work, but with an astounding level of refinement.
Unfortunately, van Berkel has had less success in the United States. In 1999 he was included in a competition sponsored by the Canadian Center for Architecture to come up with proposals for the development of a vast site extending west from Madison Square Garden to the Hudson River, but nothing came of it. A year later, he was awarded a commission for the design of a major addition to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. The design featured an ingenious system of intertwining ramps that connected several existing 19th-century buildings around a central court. But the museum’s board and directorship changed, and it died.
The Villa NM is a taste of what we’ve been missing. The seeming ease with which van Berkel handles such a complex formal language makes you eager to see the discoveries that are yet to come.
In the end, however, the house’s most delicious feature may be the way it playfully mocks our cultural pretensions. In a society driven by rampant careerism and painfully averse to risk — especially the risk of being labeled gauche — the house is a monument to what can happen when you let go of inhibitions. It proves that the slickness of the computer age does not necessarily have to lead us to a world sanitized of sensual charms.

From Victorian water tower to hot property

2007-10-05T04:35:00.000+02:00

Buyers who hanker for the high life will love this Plumstead property. A converted Victorian water tower, it has amazing views over the capital - and quite a bit of style, says Ginetta Verdrickas
Just two miles from Blackheath, in less fashionable Plumstead, south-east London, a converted Victorian water tower has recently come onto the market, attracting potential buyers and passers-by who are curious to see inside this local landmark.Behind its red-brick façade, enclosed by high walls and a security gate, the tower's exterior gives few hints of what lies inside. A product of the late Victorian drive to bring clean water to the surrounding area, today the tower is being marketed as a super-smart four-bedroom home. With two doors to choose from, finding the entrance was a challenge but it's well worth coming in through the front to get the full effect. An unassuming door opens into an impressive double height hallway where you'll find a lift to take you directly to the rooms contained within the tower. The energetic might prefer to climb the original stone staircase where exposed brickwork produces a castle-like atmosphere but, be warned, the tower contains eight storeys, negating any need for a home gym.
Each floor holds one room only: the largest measures just over 12ft long by 10ft wide, and two of the property's bedrooms are housed within the tower. On the second floor is the study, with its hand-built furniture making the best use of the unusual space. An impressively vast bathroom, complete with Philippe Starck fittings, occupies the entire fourth floor. And, while it must feel disconcerting to anyone sitting in the stand-alone bath and imagining surprise guests disgorging from the lift, it's reassuring to find that the lift can be disabled from any of the rooms to ensure privacy.But if any aspect of the property could prompt agent hyperbole it is the tower's crowning glory, the glass observatory. Unsuitable for the vertiginous, the far-reaching views are best enjoyed from the balcony, which wraps around the tower. Indeed, if one feature alone could sell this unusual property, the views surely will. The British Telecom tower, the Swiss Re building ("The Gherkin") and Wembley Stadium are all clearly visible. You can look out over ancient woodland, Oxleas Wood, and another water tower, still in use, towards the distant horizon. The skyline is particularly impressive at night. City Airport is only eight miles away so keen plane-spotters will have great views of take-offs and landings. The observatory has been fashioned into a cosy living space complete with cocktail area, plasma screen TV and low sofas, making it the ultimate pulling pad to entice any damsel keen on letting her hair down à la Rapunzel. For owner Alan Rowell, who developed the tower as a commercial venture, this is his favourite spot: "It's just so relaxing and is a great chill-out room." Alan Rowell took on the tower conversion after being inspired by an architect's vision, but admits that it was not the most financially successful of projects."It has been challenging and difficult but it's also been a lot of fun and I'm really proud to have done it," he says. Tall thin towers don't necessarily make the best living spaces or the most viable conversions. But this one benefits from a two-storey building attached to the main tower by a glass walkway. "The idea was always to combine the very old with the new. I can imagine people living mainly in the additional structure and using the quirky rooms in the tower for entertaining and guests," says Rowell.The kitchen and main living space occupy the ground floor, with double height windows looking out onto a Japanese-style water feature which encircles the property. Two more bedrooms are also housed in this part of the property including the master suite with hand-built, walk-in, his-and-hers closets. The specifications are very up to the minute, with sleek, hi-tech features that include a Lutron lighting system and electrically operated curtains, blinds and shutters. But the tower also retains period detail such as exposed brickwork and wrought-iron railings in the stairwell. Initially put on the market for "a bullish £2 million", selling agents John Payne believe that the more realistic selling price of £1,395,000 will now lure a buyer: "To be honest it's a terribly difficult house to value, but if you look at the quality of the fixtures and fittings then it's enormously good value," says agent Richard O'Toole.Viewers so far include a "mixed bag of footballers and families". Keen to dissuade too many sightseers who, he accepts, simply want to see inside a building with a high curiosity factor, Richard O'Toole believes the property will appeal to a city boy from Canary Wharf - which is well within view from the tower's observatory."It will probably go to someone who can see it from their office window," he says. "I believe it could make the ultimate bachelor pad."

How Italy bought into British style

2007-09-28T14:56:00.000+02:00

Milan has a whole new neighbourhood – with help from Norman Foster
LET’S face it, no one does style quite like the Italians – and no Italians do it like the Milanese. From the designer shops on Via Montenapoleone to the elaborately decorated Duomo, this place simply oozes the stuff. And this month the fashion world descended on the city to soak up the latest designs from such notable locals as Armani, Prada and Versace.
So it might come as a surprise to find that the Milanese are looking to a British company for the design of a colossal new project here – a €1.4 billion (£980 million) city within the city, designed by the architects Foster and Partners.
The development will be called Milano Santa Giulia, an entire new quarter for the city on a 120-hectare (296acre) former industrial site just three miles from the city centre. It will feature a shopping promenade, a 32-hectare public park, a school and church, multiplex cinema, supermarket, retail park, and Milan’s first substantial conference centre.
The jewel in the crown, however, will be the crescent-shaped development of eight buildings and more than 600 luxury homes, due for completion in 2011 and designed by Norman Foster to attract the international buyer. The homes will range from one-bedroom flats to large family apartments. The half-moon shape of the complex surrounds a 4.5hectare private park with tennis courts, a fitness centre, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, squash courts and a gym.
Every apartment will have a veranda or terrace with large windows facing the park. Using the internet or a WAP phone, residents will be able to control their heating and lighting – and even check what the children are watching on television. If you are always mislaying your keys, worry no more: these apartments can be unlocked by a device that recognises your fingerprints. Equally flash is a system for opening the door remotely by tapping a security code into your mobile phone: handy if your dinner guests turn up before you do.
The site’s show apartment was styled by Foster’s wife, Elena, and features even more high-tech trickery, with buttons to reveal television screens in walls or (my particular favourite) a switch that converts the kitchen table into a cocktail bar. According to Norman Foster, “We have considered everything, from the macro down to the micro – the environmental strategy to the quality of finishes in the kitchen.”
This level of attention does not come cheap – the one-bedroom apartments cost more than €500,000 – but there is some consolation in that you are doing your bit for the environment: Santa Guilia will be a city with a conscience. Cars will be almost invisible, with many routes underground and priority given to the pedestrian. You might even chose to leave the car at home, since there will be trams throughout the development, along with underground and overground railway stations. A neat pneumatic disposal system will carry your rubbish via a pipeline to a central area, where it will be sorted for recycling, and the entire site will be powered by its own gas-fired power station.
Luigi Zunino, the chairman and CEO of Risanamento, believes that “at Milano Santa Giulia, we are creating something unique that can be applied to different urban contexts around the world – a new concept for sustainable urban living”.
With a little help from the Brits, of course.

Winery designed by Renzo Piano

2007-07-11T03:28:00.000+02:00

Cantina Rocca di Frassinello, Winery Rocca di Frassinello designed by Renzo Piano

New York Times Tower

2007-04-24T03:28:00.000+02:00

New York Times Tower in New York (Designed by Renzo Piano)

Design unveiled for new Paris concert hall

2007-04-17T03:13:00.000+02:00

PARIS: : Over the past two decades, as successive French governments poured money into renovating the Louvre and building new museums, an opera house and a national library in Paris, lovers of orchestral music here grew resentful.
Even with the vocal backing of the conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, their insistent calls for construction of a state-of-the-art concert hall went unheeded.
Now, just weeks before President Jacques Chirac leaves office, their impatience has been rewarded with the unveiling of an eye-catching design by the French architect Jean Nouvel for a $260 million concert hall.
The Philharmonie de Paris, as it will be called, is scheduled to open in the Parc de la Villette in northeast Paris in 2012.
The aluminum-clad building, which in a model, drawings and computer-generated images resembles a mound of loosely stacked plates topped by a sail 52 meters, or 170 feet, high, will have a 2,400-place auditorium designed in what experts call a "vineyard" style, with the audience seated on all sides of the orchestra on multilevel "terraces."
Once completed, if its acoustics are applauded, the Philharmonie could rank alongside the Berlin Philharmonic's hall, Vienna's Musikverein and Amsterdam's Concertgebouw among Europe's best concert halls. It will have the Orchestre de Paris as its resident orchestra and will receive other leading orchestras.
Politics rather than culture, however, were behind the decision to place the new hall in La Villette. In the early 1980s, reacting against the concentration of cultural institutions in central Paris, the French government, then led by the Socialists, decided to turn an outlying zone once crowded with slaughterhouses into a new cultural district within easy reach of low-income suburbs to the east.
As a result, La Villette today boasts a science museum, the national conservatory, a rock concert hall, a large exhibition space and the Cité de la Musique, or Music City, with its own 1,200-seat concert hall and music museum.
But one problem remained. Even now, the French and Paris city governments, which are jointly financing the Philharmonie, are aware that many middle-class music lovers are reluctant to trek to the outskirts of Paris. And resistance may have grown since the Salle Pleyel, an 80-year-old concert hall in the heart of the city, was recently renovated.
To give an extra buzz to La Villette, it was considered vital for the Philharmonie to stand out as an architectural monument.
Government officials said that Christian de Portzamparc, the French architect and 1994 Pritzker prizewinner who designed the much-acclaimed Cité de la Musique, had long assumed that he would be commissioned to build the new hall. But, they said, European Union rules required a fresh competition.
Early this year, from among 98 architectural firms submitting bids, six were invited to present detailed proposals. Last week, a 24-member jury that included the French culture minister and the mayor of Paris picked Nouvel's design over those of Portzamparc, Francis Soler, Zaha Hadid, the Vienna-based firm Coop Himmelb(l)au and the Dutch firm MvRdV.
Nouvel, 61, already has two major Paris buildings to his name - the Institut du Monde Arabe, completed in 1987, and the Musée du Quai Branly, which opened last June. He has also been chosen to build the new Louvre Abu Dhabi, part of a $1.3 billion agreement between France and the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
On the Philharmonie, he will be working with the Australian acoustician Marshall Day, associated with Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics in Japan.
While the design of the building's exterior was limited only by a maximum height and the size of the parcel, acoustics played a role in defining strict requirements for its auditorium, notably that no member of the audience should be more than 30 meters from the conductor.

Teatro Popular in Niteroi

2007-04-10T03:36:00.000+02:00

Teatro Popular in Niteroi (Designed by Oscar Niemeyer)

Tate Modern Expansion Approved

2007-04-05T03:15:00.000+02:00

Herzog & de Meuron get go-ahead for $324 million museum expansion
Herzog & de Meuron’s addition to the Tate Modern gallery in London was granted planning permission by local planning authorities last week. The project is now on track for completion by 2012, in time for the Summer Olympics. “We are delighted,” says Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director. “This decision would not have been possible without the involvement and support of local residents.”
The Swiss architectural duo’s plans for an 11-story, pyramidal tower of stacked, glazed boxes will increase the Tate Modern’s size by 60 percent. This is their second time working on the building, a converted 1930s-era power station. In 2000, Herzog & de Meuron revamped the 252,000-square-foot structure to accommodate an anticipated 1.8 million visitors annually. But the gallery quickly proved a runaway success—the first year alone saw 5 million visitors, a figure that has since settled into a steady 4 million people—necessitating more space.
The $324 million addition will equip Tate Modern with more galleries for showing contemporary visual culture, as well as more education rooms and catering facilities; a new 10th floor restaurant and roof terrace will offer panoramic views of London. Herzog & de Meuron has also designed a new park and pedestrian routes around the entire complex. A north-south “street” running between the old and new buildings will form the centerpiece of this plan, helping to draw visitor traffic into the surrounding neighborhood of Southwark, a former industrial zone now being transformed.
Tate Modern’s commitment to fine architecture and the regeneration of London will also be underlined by new exhibitions. For the first time ever, the museum will offer regular architecture shows every two years. Global Cities, opening in June, will focus on topical urban issues in London and nine other cities worldwide and examine the effects of globalization. Adapted from the centerpiece exhibit created for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2006, it draws on research from the London School of Economics to explore the themes of speed, size, density, diversity, and form. Architects Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, and artists Richard Wentworth and Nils Norman, are among the exhibitors in the show.

Richard Rogers wins Pritzker

2007-03-30T03:55:00.000+02:00

Richard Rogers, architect behind Pompidou Center, wins Pritzker
NEW YORK: Three decades after his Pompidou Center in Paris turned the architecture world upside down and brought him global fame, the British architect Richard Rogers has been named the 2007 winner of the Pritzker Prize, the profession's highest honor.
In the citation accompanying its decision, to be announced Thursday, the Pritzker jury saluted Rogers for his "unique interpretation of the Modern Movement's fascination with the building as machine, an interest in architectural clarity and transparency, the integration of public and private spaces, and a commitment to flexible floor plans that respond to the ever-changing demands of users."
In a telephone interview from London, the architect, 73, said he did not see the award as overdue. "It's not when it comes, it's the gift that matters," Rogers said. (Renzo Piano, his co-architect on the Pompidou Center, received the Pritzker in 1998.)
The award - a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion - is to be presented to Rogers on June 4 at the Banqueting House in London.
Rogers earned a reputation as a high-tech iconoclast with the 1977 completion of the Pompidou Center, with its exposed skeleton of brightly colored tubes for mechanical systems. The Pompidou "revolutionized museums," the Pritzker jury said, "transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city." Similarly, his 1986 Lloyd's office building in the heart of London's financial district features an inside-out design, with a soaring atrium surrounded by external escalators and elevators.
Asked to describe his own stylistic signature, Rogers said he was recognized for "celebrating the components and the structure."
"That's how we get rhythm and poetry out of it," he said. He added that he would like to be known for "buildings which are full of light, which are light in weight, which are flexible, which have low energy, which are what we call legible. You can read how the building is put together."
Other high-profile projects by Rogers include the sprawling Millennium Dome in Greenwich, England, suspended from steel masts and secured by steel cable (1999), and the law courts in Bordeaux, (1998), which consist of seven "pods" clad in cedar wood surrounded by glass walls under an undulating copper roof.
His most recent major undertaking was the new terminal at Barajas International Airport in Madrid (2005), featuring waves formed by wings of prefabricated steel and a roof covered in bamboo strips. He also designed Terminal 5 at London Heathrow Airport.
Over the years, the architect has become well known for his philosophy as well as for his buildings. His London firm, Richard Rogers Partnership, has adopted bylaws specifying that the directors get no more than six times the salary of the lowest-paid architect, with the rest of the money going to profit-sharing, charities or investment.
"I don't believe in the ownership of work," he said.
The firm, with offices in Barcelona, Madrid and Tokyo, will be renamed Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners next month. "It's time to start to broaden the top," Rogers said.
He has also been in the forefront of the sustainable architecture movement, designing buildings with the environment in mind. His building for the Welsh National Assembly in Cardiff cut Parliament's energy consumption in half, he said; as chief adviser on architecture and urbanism to the mayor of London, he has encouraged the construction of more compact developments around mass transportation.
"It's always been part of our work," he said. "I don't think we realized the limited number of years before were going to have such serious problems, that mankind might be wiped off the earth. Certainly it's become much more urgent."
Rogers, the 31st Pritzker laureate, was born in Florence in 1933. His father was a doctor and his mother had a great interest in modern design, he said. In 1938, the Rogers family moved to England, where he struggled through the public school system; many years later, he received a diagnosis of dyslexia.
"I was called backward," Rogers said. "We didn't know dyslexia."
Just as he was completing secondary school in 1951 - and seriously considering a career in dentistry - the Festival of Britain introduced him to modern architecture. He was captivated by some of the temporary buildings thrown up along the South Bank.
A two-year stint in the British military took him to Trieste, where he became acquainted with the work of his father's cousin, Ernesto Rogers, one of Italy's prominent architects, and decided to attend the Architectural Association School in London.
In 1961, Rogers attended Yale University on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a master's degree in architecture. There he developed an interest in Frank Lloyd Wright - "My first god," the architect has said.
After working for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in New York, he returned to England to start his first practice, Team 4, with his first wife, Su Brumwell; Norman Foster; and Wendy Cheeseman.
Rogers and Foster each struck out on their own in 1967. By 1971, Rogers had joined forces with Piano to create Piano + Rogers. That year they won the commission to design the Pompidou Center, where Rogers's work will be featured in an exhibition this fall. Piano and Rogers split in 1978.
Over the years, Rogers has racked up plenty of accolades, including a life peerage in 1996. But the honors have not convinced him that architects deserve the rock-star status that so many enjoy. Richard Rogers Partnership employs more than 100 people, he pointed out, and he could not achieve what he does without them.
"You are leading a team," Rogers said. "I've never really understood how architects can think of themselves as an individual."
Rogers has four projects under way in New York: an expanded Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Manhattan's Far West Side; a tower at the World Trade Center site; a complex at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens; and a redesign of the East River waterfront.
Not all of these designs have been well received. Appraising Rogers's vision for the Javits Center in The New York Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff said its boxy design was "a decent but not particularly dazzling work of architecture." But the critic offered glowing praise for the architect's re-imagination of Manhattan's East Side waterfront, designed in collaboration with Gregg Pasquarelli of SHoP Architects and the landscape architect Ken Smith.
"The idea is to create a seamless, contemplative environment along the waterfront that embraces both the fine-grained scale of the surrounding communities and the monumental scale of the freeway," Ouroussoff wrote. "In doing so, the architects shrug off the conflict between Modernists and historicists that absurdly still defines so many urban planning debates in New York."
Rogers said he was gratified by his New York commissions. He described the Javits project on the Far West Side as "the most complex, but also the most exciting potentially - as a public space that could create the regeneration of a large area which is very depressed."

Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre by Zaha Hadid

2007-03-27T03:28:00.000+02:00

Zaha Hadid Architects announce the design of the Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre:a new cultural institution for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on behalf of the Tourism Development and Investment Company of Abu Dhabi (TDIC).Zaha Hadid unveiled the design of the new Performing Arts Centre at a press conference in Abu Dhabi, UAE today.
Hadid’s Performing Arts Centre concept, a 62 metre high building is proposing to house five theatres – a music hall, concert hall, opera house, drama theatre and a flexible theatre with a combined seating capacity for 6,300. The Centre may also house an Academy of Performing Arts.The Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre will be one of five major cultural institutions on the new 270-hectacre cultural district of Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi - developed by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on behalf of the Tourism Development and Investment Company of Abu Dhabi (TDIC).
Zaha Hadid described the design of the Performing Arts Centre as “a sculptural form that emerges from a linear intersection of pedestrian paths within the cultural district, gradually developing into a growing organism that sprouts a network of successive branches. As it winds through the site, the architecture increases in complexity, building up height and depth and achieving multiple summits in the bodies housing the performance spaces, which spring from the structure like fruits on a vine and face westward, toward the water.”“The Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre is a continuation of the long-standing relationship we have with the Guggenheim Foundation and with the Emirate. We are very honoured to be a part of the project,” states Hadid. “Our first Guggenheim exhibition design, ‘The Great Utopias’, was in 1992 whilst the very successful mid-retrospective of our work closed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York less than two months ago. We’ve also been working in Abu Dhabi for many years, the Sheikh Zayed Bridge was a seminal project for the office and its construction is well underway”.
Thomas Krens, Director of the Guggenheim Foundation said, “In Abu Dhabi we have had the good fortune to discover a partner that not only shares our point of view, but expands upon it. The plans for Saadiyat Island and the cultural district, envisioned and developed by the Abu Dhabi Government, are, quite simply, extraordinary. When this comprehensive and inclusive vision is realised, it will set a standard for global culture that will resonate for decades to come.”

The City of sport

2007-03-24T02:38:00.000+01:00

The city of sport in Rome (designed Santiago Calatrava)